Archive for January 2009

Make the most of IRCTC

Although it lacks the friendliness of world-class e-Commerce websites, IRCTC.co.in (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation), the train ticket booking website of Indian Railways is possibly the most trafficked e-Commerce website in India due to the monopoly it enjoys in online ticket reservation...

Security, SQL Server

5 free SQL Server tools

In the 10th Anniversary edition of SQL Server Magazine, there are recommendations to 5 free tools for SQL Server. Two of them are for load testing and the others for preventing SQL Injection -SQLQueryStress - query load testing tool written by SQL Server MVP Adam Machanic.SQL Load Generator - run multiple...

miscellaneous, Websites

Pay It Forward with Wikipedia

One of the best free learning resources on the Web is Wikipedia. It has been built by thousands of altruistic volunteers from across the world. Despite some controversies, it is favored by millions and it runs on donations. If you have benefited from it, you can donate to the cause or pay it forward...

miscellaneous

Technorati's Blogosphere Report

Did you know, Mort Reichek, a World War II army veteran & former editor of Business Week, began blogging when he achieved octogenarian status in 2005?If you are a blogger, you may find useful tips & interesting stats about bloggers & blogging in Technorati's Annual Blogosphere Report.Key...

PDF, Tools/Utilities

PDFZilla overrides PDF's copy protection

Giveaway Of The Day recently offered a FREE licensed copy of PDFZilla. PDFZilla has a option to convert a PDF to Word, RTF or text file format.I was a little surprised to discover that it can even convert PDFs with copy protection and as a result text can be copied from the converted file. I (naively?)...

Learning Resources

Learning Resources for Algorithms & Data Structures

For Computer Science students & developers, a good knowledge of Algorithms & Data Structures is essential. Not all reading material you find may be easily digestible & put to practical use. Here is a list of useful articles, audio & video presentations that are freely available online...

ASP.NET, HOWTO, Javascript

HOW TO read cookie placed by ASP.NET using JavaScript

You can retrieve the cookies with JavaScript if you set the HttpOnly property of HttpCookie class to false.The HttpOnly property gets or sets a true/false value if cookie is accesible by client side javascript. If value is true, cookie will be accessible only by server side ASP.NET code. The default...

miscellaneous, Tips

Digital Photography Tips & Tricks

It's difficult not to get fascinated by a digital camera once you lay hands on it. It's also not easy not be intrigued by all the features and settings of the camera. The convenience of not having to buy film rolls & wait for them to be developed in order to view your photos as in older times means...

Book Review

Book Review: A People's History of the United States

On my sixteenth birthday, a cousin gifted me a copy of MAD magazine ("Number one in a field of one"). The magazine or comic book as some would call, satirizes various aspects of American life & generally takes the side of the underdog. It had a perspective that was unique and it's irreverent (but...

Tools/Utilities

Giveaways

The site Giveaway Of The Day offers free licensed software with full functionality for download for a time-limited period, generally 24 hours. You can subscribe to their RSS Feed to track goodies that may be of your interest.Their current giveaway is TextAloud, a text to speech tool that also let's...

ASP.NET, Browsers, Security

A Web App Is As Secure As You Make It & the Browser It Runs On

Did you know about these security issues...An IP addresses such as 74.125.19.99 can be written in ambiguous ways such as 74.0x7d.023.99 (mixing decimal, octal, and hexadecimal notation) or 74.8196963. This is a trick used in phishing exploits.SVG natively permits embedded scripts and event handlers....

Excel, HOWTO

HOW TO get date N working days ahead in Excel

I use Excel occasionally and I'm always amazed at how there is always a function that you can adapt to suit a requirement.To get date 3 working days ahead in Excel there is a helpful WORKDAY function.It however returns a number that represents a date that is the indicated number of working days before...

SQL Server

Deprecated SQL Server 2008 Features

"Overnight success takes a long time" - Paul Buchheit, original lead developer of GMail If you plan to migrate to SQL Server 2008 or later in the future, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by being aware of the deprecated features. Some of the changes have been made to get in line with ANSI SQL...

miscellaneous

Microsoft Technical Fellows

"Success is waking up and doing what you love and working long hours and feeling blessed you get to work them, feeling like the luckiest guy on earth that you get to do your job."- John Wood, Founder and CEO of Room to Read and author of 'Leaving Microsoft to Change the World' As Mary Jo Foley reports,...

Javascript, jQuery

jQuery References

jQuery is pretty comprehensive and it is good to have a handy reference while you are working with it. It boggles me why the index of :nth-child starts from 1 while for most other functions the index is zero-based.These references can be great time-savers -Visual jQueryjQuery API Browser (downloadable...

C#, Javascript

Regular Expression to negate non-matching characters

While constructing a regular expression pattern, sometimes it may be easier to write a pattern that negates the non-matching characters (did I just write a double negative?) rather than write a more complex pattern to pick matching characters. Let's say you want to ignore a word that has vowels.The...

HOWTO

HOW TO get thumbails from Amazon, YouTube

There is a pattern in which URLs to generate image thumbnails are created by Amazon, YouTube. The trick to get the images is to manipulate these URLs.Check these detailed notes on how an Amazon URL to fetch an image is built.As per this discussion thread, you can adapt the format of the YouTube URLs...

HOWTO, WebApps

HOW TO use Google Reader for bookmarking useful pages

Social bookmarking sites & online bookmarking sites serve a good purpose but require logging into an additional site. Wouldn't it be good if your Feed Reader (supposing it is Google Reader) doubles as a bookmarker to preserve your favorite pages as well?This tip requires some familiarity with the...

ASP.NET, miscellaneous

One week of BigFlix

Last week I signed up for the Monthly Plan of BigFlix, India's version of NetFlix. The largest number of movies are produced from India and this means that there is also a huge audience for it (although they don't generate the kind of revenue that Hollywood movies do). So it makes this movie rental...

ASP, ASP.NET, Javascript, jQuery

Infinite Scrolling or Continuous Scrolling UI Pattern

One of the innovative AJAX features I like is the Infinite Scrolling or the Continuous Scrolling UI Pattern you seen in websites like Google Reader and Wikia Search (the open source search engine!)UIPatterns explains Continuous Scrolling in the following way:In contrast to the Pagination patterns, the...